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Operations
Flow, constraints, queues and the work that moves work.
- Batch sizeHow much work is accumulated before it moves to the next step.ConceptsBusiness
- Brooks's lawAdding people to a late project makes it later.ConceptsBusiness
- Built to SellA service business only has value apart from its owner when it does one repeatable thing through a documented process that other people can run.BooksBusiness2011
- Burn RateThe rate at which a business consumes cash, usually stated monthly.ConceptsBusiness
- Campbell's lawThe more a quantitative indicator is used for social decision-making, the more it will be corrupted — and the more it will distort the process it was meant to monitor.ConceptsBusiness
- Cash Conversion CycleThe time between paying for work and being paid for it.ConceptsBusiness
- ChurnThe rate at which customers leave.ConceptsBusiness
- Customer acquisition costThe fully loaded cost of winning one customer, including the salaries of everyone who touched the deal.ConceptsBusiness
- Deep WorkSustained concentration is becoming rare as it becomes valuable, and it has to be scheduled rather than fitted around interruptions.BooksBusiness2016
- DelegationTransferring responsibility for an outcome, not just the task.ConceptsBusiness
- Eliyahu M. GoldrattThe theory of constraints, the five focusing steps, and the critique of local optimisation.FiguresBusiness1947–2011
- Gall's lawA complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.ConceptsBusiness
- Goodhart's lawWhen a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.ConceptsBusiness
- Hofstadter's lawIt always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.ConceptsBusiness
- How to make a business sellableA business sells on predictable revenue that does not depend on the owner.GuidesBusiness
- How to tell whether your business runs without youLeave for two weeks without giving anyone a way to reach you.GuidesBusiness
- Just-in-timeProducing or ordering only what the next step actually needs, when it needs it, rather than building stock in advance.ConceptsBusiness
- KaizenContinuous improvement through many small changes made by the people doing the work, rather than through occasional large ones imposed from above.ConceptsBusiness
- Little's lawIn a stable system, the average number of items in it equals the arrival rate times the average time each spends there.ConceptsBusiness
- Manual vs automaticA manual business requires you to turn the levers; an automatic one runs, pays distributions and survives your absence.FrameworksBusinessWhether you own a business or a job
- Murphy's lawAnything that can go wrong will go wrong.ConceptsBusiness
- Owner dependencyThe degree to which a business needs one specific person to keep working.ConceptsBusiness
- Parkinson's LawWork expands to fill the time available for its completion.ConceptsBusiness
- Perverse incentivesAn incentive that produces the opposite of what it was meant to, because people optimize the thing rewarded rather than the thing intended.ConceptsBusiness
- Peter DruckerFounding management as a discipline; management by objectives; naming and analysing knowledge work.FiguresBusiness1909–2005
- Process DebtThe accumulated cost of doing things ad hoc.ConceptsBusiness
- ProductizationTurning bespoke work into a defined offering with a fixed scope, price and delivery process.ConceptsBusiness
- Proxy workActivity that resembles progress and substitutes for it.ConceptsBusiness
- Scope CreepWork that expands past what was agreed without the price expanding with it.ConceptsBusiness
- The bottleneckThe single constraint that sets the pace of a whole system.ConceptsBusiness
- The E-Myth RevisitedMost small businesses are started by technicians who are good at the work and have not learned the separate job of building a business that runs without them.BooksBusiness1995
- The Effective ExecutiveEffectiveness is a set of learnable habits — managing time, focusing on contribution, building on strengths, and deciding at the right level of generality.BooksBusiness1967
- The five whysA method for getting past a symptom by asking why repeatedly, each answer becoming the next question.ConceptsBusiness
- The Four BottlenecksEvery business is limited by one of four things at a time: the offer, marketing, sales, or delivery.FrameworksBusinessWhich part of the business to work on
- The GoalA system produces at the rate of its single binding constraint, so local efficiency everywhere else creates inventory rather than output.BooksBusiness1984
- The Jevons paradoxMaking something more efficient can increase how much of it gets used, because efficiency lowers the effective price and demand responds.ConceptsBusiness
- The law of trivialityThat the time a group spends on an item is inversely proportional to its importance.ConceptsBusiness
- The ratchet effectWhen something moves easily in one direction and not back — spending, scope, expectations, headcount.ConceptsBusiness
- The seven wastesTaiichi Ohno's categories for activity that consumes resources without adding anything a customer would pay for: transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing and defects.ConceptsBusiness
- Urgent and importantA two-way split of work by urgency and by importance, on the observation that the two come apart constantly and that urgency wins by default.ConceptsTime